There’s no delicate way of putting it, so I hope the Post won’t print it, but my pard was not alone in bed. Whether he dozed off a spell or not between times, he woke up easy enough when I rapped on the door with nothing noisier than bare knuckles.”
Nolan scowled thoughtfully and tried, “All right, say a gun went off, just as a man was coming and-“
“He’d have noticed,” Longarm interrupted. “Even if he’s more passionate than I give him credit for, I never come hard enough to miss gunshots, three of ‘em, within a quarter-mile of my naked hide. I don’t want this in the Post, neither, but I was in Room 208, cold sober and wide awake, at the time all three of these gents were gunned, or so you say. Since that ain’t too possible, I’d say we’re missing something here.”
Sergeant Greenwood said, “Say, come to study on it, I would have been in the taproom, directly below us, until just before I had to go on duty with these poor cusses already missing. It was crowded and sort of noisy downstairs, but Longarm’s right. There ain’t enough noise in a taproom at any time to muffle the sound of nearby gunshots.”
Crawford suggested, “Hold on, I recall a science filler we ran a spell back about some gent in New England working on a sort of muffler you can screw on a gun barrel.”
Longarm shook his head and said, “I read all about that notion, too. Maybe someday someone will be able to invent a silencer for anything more powerful than an air rifle, but so far they ain’t got one to work worth mention.”
“Well, say they only half-silenced the muzzle blast and you boys upstairs was really going at it hot and heavy.”
“Nope. We’re talking about three separate gunshots in three separate rooms at three separate times,” Longarm said. “Unless I’m an awful sissy, it’s my considered opinion that no man screws that hard, that long, and I hardly think my sidekick and me could have been bouncing as a team.”
He moved closer to the last victim, bent over, and wet his forefinger before rubbing it around the hole in the dead man’s face. He held his hand up to the light and said, “This one wasn’t gunned at close range. I didn’t notice powder burns on any of the others, either. It sure is a poser, ain’t it?”
“What if they were just shot on their way to work?” Crawford asked. “This part of town is sort of deserted in the wee hours, you know. What if they were just bushwhacked some distance away, brought here, and left as they are now to make it look as if they were gunned here after picking up those gals and Yeah, it does get complicated, don’t it?”
Longarm said, “They’d have been stripped on the street right away, unless those ringers enjoy wearing pissy pants. I don’t see why anyone would go to the bother of checking three fancy gals into this hotel if all the gang wanted was a place to hide the bodies a spell. It would have been a lot cheaper just to toss ‘em over the fence into the Burlington yards. They wouldn’t have been noticed much earlier, given at least some imagination with tumbleweeds and rail-yard trash. So, no, I reckon they was lured up here by them gals, talked into taking off their duds, and then killed.”
“Damn it, Longarm, you just now said that wasn’t possible,” Nolan barked.
Longarm shook his head. “I only said it was impossible to get away with shooting them. We’ll let the medical examiner tell us how they died. Anyone can poke a fool hole in a dead man and leave spent brass for the law to find, right?”
Chapter 8
It was pushing eleven-thirty A.M. when Longarm strolled into the Odion Theatre via the stage door off the alley leading in from Larimer Street. The doorman knew Longarm of old, so he just nodded and said, “Third dressing room from the top of the steps, cowboy. I hope you know we’re putting on a matinee performance in less’n an hour?”
Longarm assured the dirty old man he was there on official business, and moved deeper into the backstage gloom. It smelled just the way other such places smelled, a mixture of rosin dust, old rope, raw lumber, sweat, and theatrical makeup. It brought back pleasant memories. He’d once ridden herd on the Divine Sarah and her French troupe, and of course there’d been that time he’d spent riding with an opera company who’s star had shone on him a spell.
But the show-gal he’d come to the Odion to see seemed sort of sore at him when she opened her dressing-room door. She hauled him inside, shut the door, and called him a two-timing brute.
He smiled down at the older but still mighty handsome bleached blonde wearing nothing but an open kimono of red silk as he assured her, “Now, Miss Pearl, you know as well as I do that calling either of us a mere two-timer would be a mortal insult to our warm natures.”
She laughed despite herself and asked, “How long has it been, a year or more?”
“At least that long, and I’ve missed you horrible. But to tell the truth, I’m here on law business today.”
“Good, grab a seat while I put on my makeup for the savages out front. I was afraid you only wanted to screw me, and the show must go on, in less time than we have for nicer tricks.”
Longarm put his hat atop an open steamer trunk and straddled one of the two chairs in the small cluttered room. The voluptuous blonde shrugged off her kimono to reveal she wasn’t really blonde. She slid the other chair back from her dressing table and sat down, stark but businesslike, to start powdering her face whiter than Longarm really admired. He knew she had to look sort of spooky on stage. She was billed as “Pearl of Wisdom,” and had a sort of mind-reading act. He knew better than to ask her how on earth she could tell what was in a gent’s pocket seven rows back from the footlights, with only a regular usher helping her. So as she put on her makeup he told her about the Great Costello and all the mean tricks he’d been pulling of late.
The much more attractive practitioner of illusion wrinkled her pert nose at the mention of her rival and said, “Oh, him. I was on the same bill with his act one time, when I was too young to ask for real money. He never made it to the big time. He was just a mechanic with a lot of stooges—way more stooges than a real pro needs.”
Longarm said, “I told you last time, in Omaha, how much I admired the way you can slicker so good working alone, Miss Pearl.”
She sniffed and said, “It was Sioux City, and I fail to see why a man who knows me better than my gynecologist has to call me a Miss, damn it.”
Longarm chuckled and said, “I was just testing you. I’m sure glad you remember me as well as I remember you, Pearl. But, like you said, the show must go on and I’m hot on the trail of the Great Costello. So could
